Drunken Spells and Secrets
by Lilies of Avonlea
Summary: Anne and Gilbert meet at a party


"How do I look?" Diana did a little twirl and Anne had to stifle a fond giggle—she knew her friend would take that as laughter at _her_ and not just a bubbling over of love for the girl standing in front of her.

"You look enchanting and exactly like Rosie the Riveter."

"But better! Because I'm a woman of colour and therefore an accurate representation of the wartime workforce when this icon was created." Diana turned toward the mirror and began to put an extra coat of mascara on.

"Exactly," Anne agreed with an even wider smile. She turned to the mirror and tugged on the bottom of her grey skirt, wishing her costume was a bit more obvious.

"Well, it's not like redheads have a lot of selection anyway. Besides, she's one of my favourite characters from the novels," she muttered to herself and grabbed the toy broomstick by her mirror.

"Oh, stop fussing. You make an absolutely perfect Ginny and I bet loads of people get it. It's not like it's one of those obscure books you're reading all the time." Diana laced up her converse shoes and slid her wallet into the front pocket of her jeans. She grabbed her keys off her vanity. "Shall we head out?"

Anne nodded eagerly, the buzz of the cider she'd had an hour ago already wearing off. She looked wistfully at the minifridge where the rest of the cider was but knew that they were already a bit behind the schedule for their shenanigans and followed Diana out the door.

Once they were out into the frigid Vancouver air, Anne put her arm around Diana's shoulder and huddled her close.

"I'm so pleased it's not raining this year! Last year it was just pouring down, I almost didn't want to do anything. Priscilla had to forcibly remove me from my dorm." Anne exclaimed.

"It's _always_ raining here; I don't know how you stand it. Remember December at home?" Diana giggled.

"Diana, are you forgetting that it _snows_ in December back home?!" Anne put her hands up in mock horror. "Wait until I email Mrs. Lynde this. She'll have the whole of Avonlea informed by night fall! _Diana Barry has forgotten all about us!_"

Diana let out a loud, hearty laugh and shrugged. "Okay, okay. You got me. Where are we going again?"

"Priscilla's sorority house! Hang on, it's in this direction," she took her friend by the shoulders and steered her down a side street. At the end of the block there was a large old house with decorations all over the front porch and students streaming in and out of it already. Anne breathed a sigh of relief.

"Oh thank God we're not too early."

She pulled out her phone as they were walking up the front steps to text Priscilla and let her know she was here. Immediately, she heard someone shriek to her left and turned to find the bubbly blonde southern girl running across the front porch to her and Diana.

Priscilla had always had a fondness for costume parties and never failed to outdo herself in her costume. This year she was dressed as a silent film star, her face made-up like she was in a black and white film.

"Wow, Pris! You look amazing!" Anne yelled over the noise coming from the house.

"You too, doll! I love your Ginny—and the Rosie you brought is just gorgeous! I'm Priscilla, I've heard so much about you Diana! She never stops talking about you!" Priscilla laughed loudly and pulled both of the girls in for a hug. "C'mon! I need you two to be way more inebriated if we're going to have a good time!"

An hour or so later, Diana was engrossed in a fierce debate with another girl dressed as Tony the Tiger who seemed to be paying very close attention to the Darcy across the room and not what was being debated, and Anne subtly slipped away. She was at that stage of the night where she'd had just enough to drink or maybe just a bit too much and all she wanted to do was laugh and sing and dance, but she knew that was terribly silly of her and so she decided what she needed that very second was some fresh air. She made her way through the crowd of sweaty student bodies, stopping in the kitchen to kiss Priscilla's cheek and shout that she was going outside momentarily, not to worry. Priscilla nodded and thrust another bottle at her, and Anne made her way out the back door into the cool autumn night. Few people had chosen to stay outside since it was decidedly turning into winter a bit faster than everyone had anticipated, but Anne Shirley was a girl of the island through and through and knew that a little cold wind never hurt anyone.

Noticing someone in the distance snacking on an apple, she walked towards them, half out of drunken curiosity. As she got nearer, she realised who it was and stopped a few feet away, and then a laugh came burbling up out of her.

Gilbert looked up, startled, and raised an eyebrow at the girl in front of him. "What? Have you come to yell at me some more? Break another expensive tablet over my head?"

Anne kept laughing, unable to explain to him or to herself why. Of course the only person outside would be Gilbert Blythe eating an apple, and of course he'd be dressed up like Harry Potter while she was Ginny Weasley and just tipsy enough to admit to herself that he really was fantastically good-looking and maybe he did make her laugh sometimes (all the time).

Finally, she stopped, and closed the distance between them, plucking the reminisce of his eaten apple of his hands, dropping it into a near by trash can, and digging the heel of her Doc Martens into the soft grass now beneath her feet. Then she wrapped an arm around his shoulders.

"Oh, Gil. I'm not here to yell at you. I'm far too drunk and happy to do that." She leaned her head on his shoulder. "And I'm sorry I broke your tablet over your head, but it serves you right for that horrid stuff you said about me and other women."

Gilbert sighed. "Oh, alright. I can't stay mad at Redmond's prettiest girl, and definitely not the best Ginny I've seen in years."

He unhooked her arm from around his shoulders, but kept hold of her hand and led her over to a bench in the backyard, knocking a few beer cans off of it before they sat down. She turned to face him and swung her legs over his lap.

"Tell me something you've absolutely never told anyone. Doesn't have to be deep or anything, just an absolute secret," she blurted out, then took a sip of her beer. For some reason she had decided that this was the very moment she was going to learn everything she needed to know about Gilbert Blythe and if she wanted to be around him ever again. (As well as, possibly the last night she'd drink liquor for the next few years of her life.)

Gilbert laughed and leaned back, taking a gulp from the drink in his hand, and sighed.

"When I was twelve, my dad got really sick and I didn't really know what to do. But I had these really weird notions of bargaining with the universe to make things happen, and it had worked a few times, so I thought maybe I'd bargain with him again if he would help my dad pull through. There was this really horrifying abandoned church in the town that I grew up in and a bunch of my friends had been riling me up with ghost stories about it all week, and so I bargained that if I could spend a whole night in the church alone my dad would _have_ to pull through.

"My mom was spending the night at the hospital so it was really easy to just slip out of the house and walk down the lane to the gates of the church. Honestly, I was so scared I almost turned and ran out of there, but I was so scared about what might happen if I didn't stick to my promise, and so I walked in and picked a nice spot on a wooden crate and sat down. It was honestly not so bad for the first few hours, and I almost dozed off, but a storm was picking up at around three o'clock in the morning, and the rain started leaking in from a whole above me so forcefully that I had no hope of sleeping."

"Long story made incredibly short, the next time I woke up I was in my own bed and my fever had just broken. Turns out I'd given myself pneumonia from sitting uncovered from the rain for that long—but I _did_ spend the whole night in that old creep building of a church, and my dad was in full remission the next week." He took another sip of his beer with a small grin on his face. "It's still the dumbest thing I've ever done, but no one really knows why I did it. I told everyone I'd been reading out there and just dozed off."

Anne's grey eyes were wide and (to her great embarrassment) slightly misty from his story. She leaned forward and hugged her knees, putting her face dangerously close to his.

"That's absolutely... the sweetest thing I've ever heard in my whole life. And I was the queen of doing idiotic things because of my imagination, so that's high praise." She reached forward and pushed his fake glasses up on his nose nervously.

"And what about you, Ginny? Aside from putting your elbow in the butter dish behind me last week in the cafeteria, of course."

Anne let out another tinkling laugh and leaned back on one arm, taking another swig from her bottle as she did so.

"Something I've never told anyone, hmm? Okay, well... Last year, my first year here, I was sick of everyone asking me if I had a soul and teasing me about being a ginger, but I was too broke to go get my hair done professionally, so I bought a boxed hair dye and boxed hair bleach and tried to colour my own hair. Except I guess I must have done it wrong, because my hair went swamp green and I didn't leave my dorm for a week and a half after it happened. I'm so glad it happened on Spring Break because I would've missed so much class time, but after that I wore toques for the whole rest of the semester until I could grow it out long enough and cut it off."

Gilbert started laughing. "That's it? I told you a positively heart-wrenching story and you tell me you accidentally turned your hair green last year? Anne, you're terrible at this whole 'spilling-your-soul-to-someone-else' thing." He took his glasses off and placed them on her face. "Because I like you, I'll give you a second chance."

Anne's face went red after he said that, and she leaned forward again. "You like me?"

"Well, yeah," Gilbert said carelessly. "You're smart, you're really funny, and you're so sure of yourself—it's really refreshing to be around you. So, go on. Tell me something you've never told anyone else before."

Anne bit her lip and swung her legs off of his lap, placing them firmly on the ground to stop the swooping happening in her stomach (that she suspected had nothing to do with the alcohol she'd consumed that night). She stared intently at the drink in her hand and picked at the label on the bottle.

"I really hate not talking to you when you're in our Astronomy study group. And I respond to things you say in my head all the time. And I've actually spent time thinking about how your eyes remind me of a nebula that we saw through a telescope once. I even wrote a terrible sonnet about it once and tried to convince myself it wasn't about you." The words tumbled out before she even thought about it.

Silence blanketed the two of them for a moment, and Anne held her breath the whole time, a million different scenarios popping in and out of her head as her overactive imagination ran wild and twisted everything she'd just said into three thousand bad situations.

"Look up," Gilbert whispered after some time had passed (it could have been seconds, it could have been hours). When she did, he was staring at her with a strange look on his face, somewhere between the fond glances Matthew had given her after she'd let her words get away from herself again, and the way Roy had sometimes looked at her when she whispered over and over that she loved him before they broke up. He reached out and took the glasses off of her face, and then cupped her cheek, looking into her eyes.

"Yours look like the stars to me," he said simply, and then all of a sudden his lips were on hers. He tasted faintly of cheap beer and the five cent apples at Lawson's, and it was no grand sweeping gesture, but Anne gave in wholly to everything she was feeling and wrapped her arms around his neck.

When they finally pulled apart, Anne started laughing again, and then threw her arm over Gilbert's shoulders for the fourth time that night.

"Oh, Gil. We're in so much trouble now, aren't we?" She said thinking of the various girls who would probably try to kill her tomorrow.

He laughed. "Not anymore than we can handle."


End file.
